Talk:Wishful thinking
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Inappropriate promotion of Christopher Booker
editThis is an article that encompasses a number of academic fields, including multiple sub-fields of psychology. Presently, about half the lead explains the opinions of one person, Christopher Booker, including a long quotation. It's quite extraordinary to give one person's opinion this prominence in a Wikipedia article, so he must be a central expert to this field, right?? The article doesn't even describe who he is but mentioning him right after the "Psychologists..." sentence gives the false impression he was some sort of psychologist.
It turns out Booker was not any kind of expert, but someone with no scientific credentials or position, who wrote books and columns denying all sort of things for which there is overwhelming scientific evidence; anthropogenic climate change, health risks of passive smoking, dangers of asbestos and so on. The source for his opinions isn't any reputable scholarly publication but a newspaper opinion column. With his dogged pursuit of ideas that are totally discredited, he qualifies as what's politely called a "fringe thinker" or, if money was the motivation, a denialist.
There are plenty of scholarly books and papers about how people react when reality conflicts with their beliefs or their wishes. So there is no need to cite this non-expert's non-peer-reviewed theory of stages of wishful thinking, especially when the things he identified as "fantasies" are just things he disagreed with politically such as the European Union. He doesn't merit mention at all in an article for which there is a huge amount of actual scientific research. MartinPoulter (talk) 12:48, 1 August 2025 (UTC)